Observatory Version of Misc Musings, Ravings, and Random Thoughts

I had thought that we needed something in the observatory to handle the random little scientific mind meanderings that occur from time to time. So, this is my attempt to start one.

And I start it with my own meandering: I think I can guess what the next "Way Big Thing" will be -- Neutrino-based power sources. Some device, capable of generating a field that causes neutrinos to interact more strongly with matter, then use the excited electrons to produce currents like a solar panel. Right now, if my calculations are correct, we're getting some 68 mW / cm^2 in Neutrino energy flux on the Earth's surface.

Now, this is my own little raving/random thought. I'd love to hear others.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

Lack of heating is very significant in some climates. The building never dries out and wood rot accelerates dramatically.

I had thought that we needed something in the observatory to handle the random little scientific mind meanderings that occur from time to time. So, this is my attempt to start one.

And I start it with my own meandering: I think I can guess what the next "Way Big Thing" will be -- Neutrino-based power sources. Some device, capable of generating a field that causes neutrinos to interact more strongly with matter, then use the excited electrons to produce currents like a solar panel. Right now, if my calculations are correct, we're getting some 68 mW / cm^2 in Neutrino energy flux on the Earth's surface.

Now, this is my own little raving/random thought. I'd love to hear others.

This would appear to be Larry Niven's "scrith". In his books at least, it's so improbable that even civilizations with faster-than-light travel have a hard time believing in it.

As a theoretical exercise, it's fun, but I don't see it ever really happening. Sorry to be a downer.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

The cumulative effect of missing lots of little maintenance tasks. You don't stop animals from getting in, so a little ecosystem starts to form. You don't control plants around the building, so vines/roots start to invade the structure. You don't replace popped nails in sheetrock, and they eventually start working their way out of walls. You don't maintain the rainwater drainage system, so it clogs and you start to get standing water in and around the building. You don't run HVAC, so the building sits at ambient; all its components go through wider thermal expansion/contraction ranges. Weather sealing gets old and ineffective, and water starts getting in every time it rains.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

The cumulative effect of missing lots of little maintenance tasks. You don't stop animals from getting in, so a little ecosystem starts to form. You don't control plants around the building, so vines/roots start to invade the structure. You don't replace popped nails in sheetrock, and they eventually start working their way out of walls. You don't maintain the rainwater drainage system, so it clogs and you start to get standing water in and around the building. You don't run HVAC, so the building sits at ambient; all its components go through wider thermal expansion/contraction ranges. Weather sealing gets old and ineffective, and water starts getting in every time it rains.

Etc, etc.

Entropy's a bitch.

I guess you're right, and it's a good point about no HVAC. I guess my thinking is that people don't really do all that many maintenance tasks to the basic structure of the buildings on a daily basis. They just kind of come in and out and fix something maybe once every few years. So it struck me as weird that a building that was sound but just devoid of habitation could fall apart so quickly.

It would also depend significantly on the environment. Structures built in an arid desert are going to last a lot longer than anything in a wetter environment. I'd think Phoenix, Arizona would remain upright much, much longer than New York City.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

The cumulative effect of missing lots of little maintenance tasks. You don't stop animals from getting in, so a little ecosystem starts to form. You don't control plants around the building, so vines/roots start to invade the structure. You don't replace popped nails in sheetrock, and they eventually start working their way out of walls. You don't maintain the rainwater drainage system, so it clogs and you start to get standing water in and around the building. You don't run HVAC, so the building sits at ambient; all its components go through wider thermal expansion/contraction ranges. Weather sealing gets old and ineffective, and water starts getting in every time it rains.

Etc, etc.

Entropy's a bitch.

I guess you're right, and it's a good point about no HVAC. I guess my thinking is that people don't really do all that many maintenance tasks to the basic structure of the buildings on a daily basis. They just kind of come in and out and fix something maybe once every few years. So it struck me as weird that a building that was sound but just devoid of habitation could fall apart so quickly.

I think part of it is that things get done routinely that people don't think of as "maintenance tasks," but are actually important to keeping a building habitable. Stuff like mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, shoveling the sidewalk, cleaning the gutters, pest control - even just running the taps frequently - are all things that, if left undone for long enough, will compromise the building.

I think part of it is that things get done routinely that people don't think of as "maintenance tasks," but are actually important to keeping a building habitable. Stuff like mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, shoveling the sidewalk, cleaning the gutters, pest control - even just running the taps frequently - are all things that, if left undone for long enough, will compromise the building.

Yeah, that's why you need to have a home occupied to be able to insure it.

I wondered the other day what causes buildings to decay. I was looking at some Urban Exploration photos (when people go into random abandoned factories, etc and take pictures) and realized that a number of the buildings had only been abandoned for maybe 10 years, yet showed shocking deterioration. Meanwhile many, many people live in homes that are much older and show very little decay.

So what causes decay, or rather, what prevents it? I have a hard time believing that mere vacancy can cause, for example, the entire outer facade of a structure to fall off. But that appears to be what happens.

Water seepage due to broken windows and due to rotting roof and insulation.

And wild life growing, first on the dust and water blown in through the broken windows and leaky roof, and then on it's own compost just like in nature. Roots can tear concrete, given enough time.

Freezing and defrosting cycles. Ice expands. When water freezes inside the walls (see water seepage) ice can quickly destroy the walls. Houses would stand in the desert a lot longer than in, say, Minnesota.

I was reading the other day about how back in the seventies SETI used Arecibo to beam a high power signal to a nearby galaxy(solar system?)

It will take 20,000 years to arrive at the speeds it travels at.

It dawned on me that it is entirely plausible that mankind could get there first, evolve technologically in that time frame, forget about the signal and be fucking surprised when an alien signal is discovered.

Anyway, I do like the idea of this thread, because it gives me a place to post about random seminars/journal clubs/articles that I encounter, without needing to start a thread about each one.

A recent coolest-talk-I've-seen was from Vincent Fischetti, a professor at Rockefeller University. His lab studies bacteriophage--viruses that infect bacteria. Like most viruses, the lifecycle of phage is to infect a cell, replicate inside of it, and then eventually lyse (burst) the cell membrane so that the (now much more numerous) viruses can go infect new cells.

It turns out that the way the phage get out of the bacteria is very effective, and it seems to be latching on to uber-conserved parts of the membrane structure. So what the Fischetti lab did was to purify the enzymes involved (called phage lysins, different phage have different versions) and use them as a treatment for bacterial infection. The pressure inside a bacterial cell is such that just puncturing it is enough to burst the cell.

They have video of the stuff (at tiny concentrations) wiping out bacteria in seconds--you can watch the culture clear. They've done tests in mice, basically giving them a nasty MRSA infection and then clearing the thing up with these lysins. They seem to work on lots of different bacteria, and they haven't been able to breed any resistance to it.

Their angle (there's a biotech spinoff of this research) is that they want to make a nasal spray and use it on anyone being admitted to a hospital. You harbor a bunch of bacteria in your sinuses, and a large proportion of dangerous hospital infections are actually something you were already carrying, infecting you while you're sick with the flu or whatever. Basically they knock down your latent bacteria to a hundredth or a thousandth of its normal levels, and by the time it comes back you're hopefully out of the hospital.

The caveats are a) we can't actually prove that we'll never see resistance to this, and they're definitely banking on that with their super-lucrative "everyone gets a dose" business plan, and b) it only works on gram-positive bacteria. That covers a lot of the major infectious diseases, though. If it really works on stuff like MRSA that'd be a pretty big deal. If they found one for drug-resistant TB that would be enormous.

At a guess, I would say the laws of thermodynamics. Your neutrino-interaction-increasing field has to use less power than you manage to harvest. That sounds problematic. Although I guess it's not a closed system, so maybe it could happen. I'd be happy to be wrong.

At a guess, I would say the laws of thermodynamics. Your neutrino-interaction-increasing field has to use less power than you manage to harvest. That sounds problematic. Although I guess it's not a closed system, so maybe it could happen. I'd be happy to be wrong.

As you say, it's not a closed system. Conceptually, it isn't that different from extracting power from solar thermal radiation. But due to just how weakly neutrinos interact, I'm going to say it's not happening any time soon (or ever, probably). I'd rather get excited about space-based solar panels once SpaceX & company can drastically reduce launch-to-orbit costs.

If you define "I really want to be able to go faster than light speed" as plausible.

I do.

It's called a wormhole, or occasionally an Einstein Rosen bridge. Sometimes folding space.

Then where are the time travelers?

Just because something has a name doesn't mean it exists. Dragons, Pegasus, Ghosts, all have names, but they don't exist. Currently, there is no physical theory that supports FTL. The lack of it,by definition, means it is implausible.

At a guess, I would say the laws of thermodynamics. Your neutrino-interaction-increasing field has to use less power than you manage to harvest. That sounds problematic. Although I guess it's not a closed system, so maybe it could happen. I'd be happy to be wrong.

As you say, it's not a closed system. Conceptually, it isn't that different from extracting power from solar thermal radiation. But due to just how weakly neutrinos interact, I'm going to say it's not happening any time soon (or ever, probably). I'd rather get excited about space-based solar panels once SpaceX & company can drastically reduce launch-to-orbit costs.

Along those lines... I'm really not sure why a PPM is out of the question under the current laws of physics... provided you get a source of energy from outside the universe.

Now that could be difficult, as currently so far as we know the universe is a closed system (meaning the laws of thermodynamics would preclude a PPM) but the universe has quite clearly not always been a closed system. (elsewise where did the sun come from?)

Our Universe is a closed system. The Sun came from energy/mass within that system.

Ok so where did that mass/energy come from? (I know the sun is a 2nd? gen star) but the universe is full of energy and mass and we're not supposed to be able to create energy. So where did it all come from?

Was it just hanging around waiting for the big bang? Do the laws of physics simply not apply to things if they occured before the creation of the universe... and if so... isn't that a bit handwavy?

Why does energy get to be created once(for the creation of the universe) but never again? I guess it's parsimonious too say that the energy simply just came into being... but I think it actually adheres closer to the laws of physics if you say that that energy came from outside the universes closed system.

Was it just hanging around waiting for the big bang? Do the laws of physics simply not apply to things if they occured before the creation of the universe... and if so... isn't that a bit handwavy?

The very first unbelievably small fragments of time after the big bang are when the laws of physics as we know them solidified. Time itself is a byproduct of the big bang. So asking about what happened "before" is a non-starter...it has no meaning. There was no 'before'. Even if all energy condensed to matter, which in turn condensed to one big ball of mass*, the resultant explosion (BB) would set new rules.

If you define "I really want to be able to go faster than light speed" as plausible.

I do.

It's called a wormhole, or occasionally an Einstein Rosen bridge. Sometimes folding space.

Then where are the time travelers?

Just because something has a name doesn't mean it exists. Dragons, Pegasus, Ghosts, all have names, but they don't exist. Currently, there is no physical theory that supports FTL. The lack of it,by definition, means it is implausible.

Not "impossible",but certainly implausible.

Well, lets play it out.

If I was a time traveller, and I travelled 1000 years back in time. Would I tell anyone? Fuck no. Being burnt at the stake for being 'teh crazy' is not my idea of fun. I would use my somewhat advanced knowledge to live like a king. Think about it. Show up with some basic steam power functions, boom. Your a hero.

If I travelled 1000 years in the future, it'd be similar in that I would tell nobody, learn all can then come back to my time and repeat the above.

Both of these things would create a paradox, creating a past/future that is radically different from what it was supposed to be, fucking up everything.

And besides, if future humans can build a wormhole generator that can take ahead or behind in time, in would certainly be able to take you through time, so that you could arrive at your destination the second you step thru the machine.

I think all are equally plausible, but the smart people building the thing will certainly ensure that idiots like me don't go blasting back 80 million years to hunt tyrannasaurus rex.

And finally. You say show me the time travellers. I can't. Can you show me they aren't here already? You can't.

Just because something has a name doesn't mean it exists. Dragons, Pegasus, Ghosts, all have names, but they don't exist. Currently, there is no physical theory that supports FTL. The lack of it,by definition, means it is implausible.

Not "impossible",but certainly implausible.

Sorry for the double posting but I think this merited a second response.

500 Years ago, rockets to the moon were just another Dragon.

100 Years ago, rockets to the moon were just a Pegasus.

60 Years ago, rockets to the moon were just a Ghost.

Now we have venture capitalists talking about mining asteroids.

If Bp or any of the other big petro companies figure out theres oil on Mars, there will be daily shuttles to and from inside of 15 years of the discovery.

And besides, if future humans can build a wormhole generator that can take ahead or behind in time, in would certainly be able to take you through time, so that you could arrive at your destination the second you step thru the machine.

What does that even mean? What does it mean to "arrive at your destination the second you step thru"? This is a Star Trek type of example. Different reference frames experience time differently. This is proven with math. This is demonstrated through observation. So, what does, "the second you step thru" mean?

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And finally. You say show me the time travellers. I can't. Can you show me they aren't here already? You can't.

By this argument, Dragons, unicorns, and God exists. I have math that shows it isn't possible. I have observations that support this theory. There are no examples of things traveling faster than the speed of light.

You have hope that all this math and physics is wrong. That's laudable. It's inspiring. I hope you're right. But, that doesn't mean it's plausible, probable, or even likely.

Where does the line get drawn between humanity's natural self-serving nature cross into being labeled as "Evil"? Where does apathy fall into the spectrum? Is it natural to not care about someone's suffering because it doesn't affect them directly, or is being apathetic to the "suffering of others" count as evil?

Where is the line drawn? Who draws it? Would you like a piece of toast?

Yeah, I know, 99 times the atmosphere of Earth, mostly carbon dioxide, no free oxygen, nor nitrogen, or hydrogen (to create water) and ambient temperature at the surface of >700C.

You would think that at that temperature, there would be energy galore to work with, but to be able to use the energy in a system, there has to be 'hotter' and 'colder' sides of the equation.

That heat, all the time, would maintain the inner radioactive heat of Venus. Volcanoes on Venus are apparently common, but is the inner heat -hotter- than the surface?

So, you have lots and lots of atmosphere to 'reduce down' to just the 1 atmosphere we humans like -- convert the CO2 into ... um, well, I dunno. You could freeze it into dry ice (in that heat, chyeah, right). Crack it into Carbon (diamond sheets?) and Oxygen. Or precipitate it, by having some aero-gel lifeform that converts Carbon Dioxide into shell.

Need some Good Ideas on how to achieve this pointless task.

Second task -- move a significantly large Water-ice moon from Jovian orbit, to earth orbit. I have zero idea how to achieve this miracle. According to Peter F. Hamilton, you just 'wish it were so' to your local Naked God and it happens.

Don't know if it was original to him or not, but I liked Kim Stanley Robinson's idea of shading Venus. In "Blue Mars", the Soletta (which was a bunch of mirrors essentially designed to increase the amount of light on Mars) was re-purposed and sent to Venus, where it acted as an orbital parasol.

There's only a little more said about what happened on Venus from that (basically, terraforming efforts had started, but were barely begun so no results yet at the time the book finished; I think the idea was to freeze out the CO2 in the atmosphere and then bury it on the surface, and then engineer a breathable atmosphere and a bioshpere), so who knows how well it would work and exactly how the effects would play out.

I suppose this is more properly philosophy of science than science itself, but a random thought that keeps popping into my head is this:

Occam's Razor is not a scientific principle. It's a lazy-thinking shortcut, satisfying the human need for closure. If two explanations both describe a phenomena, the next thing to do, from a scientific standpoint, is not to say, "Well, the simpler one is more likely to be correct." but rather "What experiment can I perform that would distinguish between these explanations?"

I suppose this is more properly philosophy of science than science itself, but a random thought that keeps popping into my head is this:

Occam's Razor is not a scientific principle. It's a lazy-thinking shortcut, satisfying the human need for closure. If two explanations both describe a phenomena, the next thing to do, from a scientific standpoint, is not to say, "Well, the simpler one is more likely to be correct." but rather "What experiment can I perform that would distinguish between these explanations?"

It's a useful construct for evaluating competing arguments. (note tribus). It also doesn't imply that the simpler version need necessarily be more correct...it asserts that one should proceed to simpler theories until simplicity can be traded for greater explanatory power.